Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela onstage at Vox Media’s 2023 Code Conference. | Photo by Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Vox Media
Runway trained its AI text-to-video generator on thousands of YouTube videos and pirated films, according to a report from 404 Media. A spreadsheet of training data obtained by the outlet includes links to YouTube channels belonging to major entertainment companies, such as Netflix, Disney, Nintendo, and Rockstar Games, along with creators like MKBHD, Linus Tech Tips, and Sam Kolder.
There are also links to channels owned by news outlets like The Verge, The New Yorker, Reuters, and Wired. “The channels in that spreadsheet were a company-wide effort to find good quality videos to build the model with,” a former Runway employee tells 404 Media. “This was then used as input to a massive web crawler which downloaded all the videos from all…
